Only Love Prevails

In the end, she had been left with little choice. The diary lay before her, innocent and unassuming, yet the box it was usually resting in – polished cherry wood, with a crushed red velvet pillow pinned inside – signaled that it could be something more. It was a family heirloom: her long-ago ancestor had bound a thin sheaf of smooth, sturdy paper in soft black leather to create a modest, yet handsome notebook. Nadine’s grandmother had simply given it to her with nothing but a stern warning: to never, ever use it.

Why keep it if it can’t be used? That was the question that burned at her. The one that she was never able to ask. Just a few short days after she took possession of the box and its forbidden treasure, Nadine’s grandmother slipped across the veil, taking the mystery of the notebook with her. Never use it, she had said, gripping Nadine’s hand tightly, waiting for her promise.

It was an ominous decree, to be sure, and also a vague one: as the years passed, Nadine agonized over the technicalities. She promised, yes, but what was she sworn to? Should she never touch it, never read it? Or simply never write in it? In time, her curiosity grew and grew. She grew as well, in boldness too, until one day she was brave enough to hold it…and to open it…and to discover that someone had written in it already.

The first entry was dated a remarkable 1616, when a spidery hand wrote a brief, unintelligible entry- something which had been obscured whether by design or the passage of time- and then never wrote again. Years later, in 1628, a new hand wrote: The Lord hath granted me great Wealth and Riches! and then, mysteriously, a simple phrase: I am sorry for all of my sins, and I repent of them all. Centuries passed with no indication. The year 1916 bore even stranger fruit. The newest author had written the date, and a flippant: No one cares.

Beyond those entries it was nothing remarkable. Full of blank and yellowed pages which smelled as old books smelled: organic, and dusty, but slightly sweet. It was heavy in the hand, though not large. The box it lay in was fine, but not extravagant. Nadine was not a particularly sentimental woman, nor was she prone to saving items that didn’t serve some function in her life. Despite her frustration, she couldn’t bring herself to break her promise to her grandmother, and at least a decade passed with the diary enshrined in its box on her dresser, untouched. Yet she could not sell it, or dispose of it, or gift it away, either. Like her grandmother, and like every eye that had beheld the book all the way back to the beginning, something bound her to it, kept it in her life like a lodestone. Through cross-country moves, house parties, flooding, theft, forgetfulness, disarray, and several attempts to pawn it off for cash, the notebook had endured.

Now Nadine was in dire straits: for months she had known that eviction was looming over her. She agonized over her next move, knowing that her options were few and far between. She had moved alone to this unassuming town – not quite a city, but a decent size – and had found employment as a grade school teacher. Although Nadine worked hard and was generally well-liked, somehow, wherever she went, bad luck seemed to follow: departments lost funding, townships merged, or schools closed down altogether. Just when she finally thought she had found something that could last, the world had been plunged into a deadly pandemic, and Nadine lost her job again. For a while she had been able to survive, combining her stimulus check with her meager unemployment funds. Even then she wasn’t sure how she would have fed herself without the help of food banks. Lately however, her unemployment checks had run out, and there was no new stimulus- although the politicians discussed it often. Her savings had been exhausted. She had no family to fall back upon, and no friends she could truly count on. Quarantined inside her quiet, empty apartment, and made helpless by her circumstances, the dreams had begun.

Normally Nadine dreamed the mundane: ripe bananas, chats with friends, forgotten keys- irrelevant, ephemeral dreams that dissolved soon after waking. The new dreams were different. She remembered them clearly, which was the first thing. They were also all, inevitably, about the small black notebook. That was the second thing.

In the first dream, she knelt before a wide stone altar and made the sacrifice of a catfish using a serrated switch blade. The knife’s edge was coated in blood, and as she watched it drip down over her gripped fingers, the catfish vanished. In its place lay the black notebook: bloodless, whole, and open on a blank page. Seeing it, Nadine startled awake. The digital clock on her nightstand offered scant illumination; it was 1:11 a.m. She couldn't sleep any more after that, and stayed up watching the book in its box on the dresser, uneasy and alert.

The next night, she dreamed she was raising money for a stranger’s funeral. Every dollar she collected just seemed to make her sadder, and the corpse’s identity kept shifting, until she could almost name them– Then at the funeral home, the director wanted to know if she liked the fuchsias. The somber parlor was bedecked in radiant pink, but her attention was fixed on the man’s hand. He held her little black notebook, and gestured with it carelessly, as if it was his. As if it meant nothing. A fire kindled in her, urged her to grab it from him, to take it back. Nadine woke up. That night she brought the box down from its lofty exile and placed it on her duvet. She opened it, but left the notebook where it lay. It was enough for her to see it safe.

Every dream amounted to the same– drawing her nearer, taunting her, pulling her notebook away: a slow torture. She wanted it gone; she wanted to possess it… She felt torn between herself, and unable to break the cycle. Finally, one night, she dreamed that she was seated at a regal desk, in a comfortable chair, across from a woman that she didn’t recognize; tall, featureless, yet beautiful. In dreams, intention is understood easily, and a great deal of politeness is forgotten. The mind flows from one point to the next like a river, with no time to stop and observe protocol. In one moment, Nadine was regarding the strange woman. In the next, the notebook was on the desk before them. She knew that this woman would answer her.

“Why won’t it leave me alone?” she asked, looking at the thing with a leaden familiarity. The question came out of her without thought, but she had to know. Why her? Why now, when everything was hard enough as it was?

“It was always meant to find you,” the woman responded kindly. “It is your job to break the chain.”

“I can’t do that,” she confessed, bowing her head heavily. A great resignation was welling up within her, and with it came frustration and exhaustion.

“Yes, you can. Now is the right time- the time to heal your wounds. Soon will be the time of new dreaming.” said the Lady. Golden light seemed to emanate from her form, and her image faded fast. “You must all do your part.”

“I don’t know what to do!” Nadine cried out. The Lady said, in a voice that reverberated through the whole of her consciousness: “WISH TRUE AND BELIEVE IT REAL. ONLY LOVE PREVAILS.”

Only Love Prevails. The words echoed through her mind and into the morning. Troubled, she realized that she couldn’t bear to be indoors anymore. The sun shone through the windows, and birds sang in the trees. Nadine put on her mask and stepped out into the day. She inhaled, and filled her lungs deeply with clean air. She walked slowly to the park, and discovered that while she had been trapped and tormented by her doubts and fears, a bright spring had bloomed. Her neighbors were similarly masked, and they strolled in the park and rejuvenated themselves.

Nadine took it all in with new eyes. For her it was as though storm clouds had parted- she was seeing the sun, and the way it touched all things, as if for the first time. Gladness filled her to be alive, and she felt almost painfully fond of all the beings of the Earth. A man rolled around in the grass with his dog. A woman held her toddler up to a tree so he could touch the bark with questing, chubby fingers. Squirrels chased each other up and down the trails, and children chased a soccer ball in the field. Something had slid into place for Nadine. She felt at peace, despite all her fears. She sat by the pond and watched ducks swim, wishing she had brought peas to feed them, until the sun set behind the hills. She walked slowly home, and slept without dreaming. She woke up with certainty in her heart.

Months ago, the idea would have had her palms sweating, her thoughts racing, her doubts screaming loudly- but now: she calmly brought the notebook out of the box with a small smile, and selected her favorite pen from the junk drawer. The dawning sun caressed her shoulders with warmth, and mists rose and dispersed from the nearby lawns. She walked back to the park where she had sat so long beside the water. With her notebook clutched tightly to her chest, she took a new way than the day before, and checked her pocket often to make sure her pen had not fallen out. The park was empty except for the birds, and sunlight glittered off the pond, dazzling her. Nadine found a drying picnic table and sat cross-legged on top of it, setting the notebook out before her.

She flipped to a blank page, uncapped her pen, and boldly wrote the date before she could take it back: 2021. Nadine took a deep breath, and looked up into the golden morning. When she closed her eyes, she could see the warm red glow of her life. She felt into the tender heart of herself. And she wrote:

We all have everything we need. We lack for nothing. It is good.

In the end, it wasn’t as scary as she’d feared. Birds sang on; a gentle breeze blew across the water, scattering light in its wake. Instead of trepidation, Nadine felt contentment. She had dreamed true, and upon waking could see that she really did have everything she needed in that moment. She thought she might discover she had everything she needed in the next moment, too. When she began to get hungry, she walked home and saw that she had food in her fridge for breakfast. She felt thankful, and smiled. While she cooked she let the radio play. Usually it was just background noise, but today Nadine was rapt as the hosts declaimed the week’s weather, and she was paying attention when their voices escalated in excitement. They announced with jubilation:

ALL CITIZENS WILL BE RECEIVING A STIMULUS BACK-PAYMENT OF TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS!

Nadine sat down suddenly on the floor, potatoes forgotten in the pan, and began to cry. She thought of her grandmother, and wept that she could not share in her happiness. When she calmed down, she took out her phone, and saw online that the country was as overjoyed as she was. She shared a photo of the pond with the ducks, and captioned it with a Thank You, and drew herself a bath. While she soaked, her phone buzzed, and a smile grew on her face as she read the notification. An old friend had messaged her:

wait… do you live here?!